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Answering Back to the News Media, Using the Internet

Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel, or so goes the old saw. For decades, the famous and the infamous alike largely followed this advice. Even when subjects of news stories felt they had been misunderstood or badly treated, they were unlikely to take on reporters or publishers, believing that the power of the press gave the press the final word.

The Internet, and especially the amplifying power of blogs, is changing that. Unhappy subjects discovered a decade ago that they could use their Web sites to correct the record or deconstruct articles to expose what they perceived as a journalist's bias or wrongheaded narration.

But now they are going a step further. Subjects of newspaper articles and news broadcasts now fight back with the same methods reporters use to generate articles and broadcasts - taping interviews, gathering e-mail exchanges, taking notes on phone conversations - and publish them on their own Web sites. This new weapon in the media wars is shifting the center of gravity in the way that news is gathered and presented, and it carries implications for the future of journalism...

Pixels by the barrel

While everyone can post a response, you still have to do it in a way that gets an audience.The mainstream media still has an audience advantage. What blogs do is make it harder for them to avoid a point of view. Blogs are the letters to the editor that the mainstream media does not want to print. If they capture enough audience, such as in the bogus TANG documents used by CBS, they have an impact.

On occasion, blogger coverage of events annoys the mainstream media that they lash out as in the recent case of the Washington Post story on Bill Roggio's reporting in western Anbar. With that story the Post probably unintentionally increased Roggio's site visits.